A few people may remember a film from almost 20 years ago called Parasomnia. That was written and directed by William Malone, it wasn't seen by many people, and I quite enjoyed it. As weak as it was in some ways, it had ideas and imagery that made it strong in others. When this film appeared on the Shudder streaming platform I just assumed that they had decided to platform the 2008 movie. Then I realised I was wrong. So I decided to give it a watch. Then I realised I was wrong again. This is a bad film that I would advise most people avoid.
Jasmine Mathews plays Riley, a young woman who sometimes gets night terrors, and those night terrors can allow an entity to cross through into our world and kill people. Riley believes that she now has things under control though. That's not quite right. It's not long until people around her are in danger, but it may not be Riley's fault. There may be people trying to force Riley to react in a certain way, hoping to make use of the power that flows from her condition.
Written and directed by James Ross II, Parasomnia is a small movie that needed a strong idea at the heart of it. Unfortunately, it doesn't have that. Arguably even more unfortunately, everyone involved with it seems to mistakenly believe that it does. The plot developments and minor twists and turns are delivered in a way that somehow feels very proud and self-assured when they should have been downplayed and obscured by a number of other simple pleasures (a bit more bloodshed, for example, and a much more playful tone for the majority of the runtime). Nothing here adheres to the general movie rule of "show, don't tell", and instead we get "tell, show, tell again" throughout many scenes.
Mathews isn't bad in her main role, but she's not given good material to work with. There are one or two moments in the third act that show how much better she could have been with a better screenplay, which is more than can be said for some of the people around her. Two of those people are RJ Brown and Sally Stewart (playing, respectively, Cam and Cam's mother). They're disappointingly weak, especially Stewart, who should have really been able to sink her teeth into things here, and that's harder to overlook when they're given so much screentime. Stephen Barrington does better with a much smaller role, Danny Brown is only around for a couple of minutes, and two other important characters are portrayed well enough by Simon Longnight and David Girard.
I can name you hundreds of movies that you should watch ahead of this one, and many of those movies will make use of very similar elements (whether you're after something with sleep demons in the mix, something twisting around and leading to what should be an impactful reveal in the third act, or something that has people being burned when they try to handle an evil energy that cannot be safely harnessed). One of those movies has the exact same title. You should avoid Parasomnia. But check out Parasomnia.
3/10
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